I am James Bartholomew and I will be guiding you through our first cannon hill collective session of 2015!

Side note: I use GIFs to express my feelings!

So before I get the ball rolling I’d like to take you on a brief flash back to our intensive week before Christmas which is a continuation of the work we did in last week’s first session.

14th December – 19th December 2014

The cannon hill collective were introduced to Leo Kay and Anna Smith who manage their own theatre company Unfinished Business (https://twitter.com/UB_theatre) and they came to work with us on a theatrical experiment called Change My Mind. We would be working on this project from December to April, so during the intensive week we were able to look back and discuss how we got to where we are now as young performers and we explored many exercises and tasks, musical and written, and really engaged with our past, present and hopes for the future, all of these tasks accumulated into the cannon hill collective filming a rough cut auto biography for 15 minutes, then the next day we spent 30 minutes editing our video’s live in the gallery where we had been working all week, and that 15 minute video was cut down to a 10 minute video.

Back in the present day! The collective got to watch half of the videos made as we only limited time together so the other half will be shown on the 27th Jan! So today’s session was comprised of watching each other’s videos and after each video we’d have exactly one minute to write down what we thought about the video, and below I have briefly summarized my thoughts in brief sentences:

VIDEO 1 – HEIDI – The Art of Clarity. Heidi’s video spoke about the effects of other people friends or strangers have on your creative outlook, and how it affected her in regards to filming but also how it is important to know who you are, and what your theatre is about and being confident in your own passion.

VIDEO 2 – CALLUM – The Art of WordsCallum started off with a spoken word piece created from words that the collective when he asked “What words describe me” during the intensive week. Callum goes into depth about how spoken word has affected his life so far and that words can be as empowering as actions.

VIDEO 3 – JORDANNE – The Art of AcceptanceJordanne speaks about beingindependent, confident and empowering to yourself is an essential part for every person to reach their full potential in life, don’t wait for the world to accept you, accept yourself.#buyyourselfflowers

VIDEO 4 – CATRIN – The Art of ExperienceCatrin talks to us about the effects of travelling to places and meet people who have enabled her to find and try out new experiences in regards to her creative growth something she may not have had if she’d stayed in her home town.

VIDEO 5 – JAMES – The Art of StorytellingJames speaks about his natural talent of being able to network, and his love of real life stories and situations, alongside his fears of those situations and stories becoming too overwhelming.

VIDEO 6 – MERCY – The Art of MusicMercy sings and talks us through the places she’s lived throughout the world and how music has been in her family for generations and she performers one of her songs she has wrote with the help of her grandmothers musical items.#layingitdown

VIDEO 7 – SARAH – The Art of SharingSarah spoke about her journey through her creative life and how working with different groups around Birmingham have helped her learn and develop crafts to teach others.

Video 8 – SAM – The Art of Acting“By definition I am a changeable entity.” Sam talks to us about being able to hone his craft. The accent. The Cities. The stories. The man.

Those were all we had time for, but I am looking forward to seeing the rest but in the final moments of the session, we were given sheets of paper, explaining the tasks we had to do that would relate to the videos and change my mind experiment and choose one member of the collective by random and begin to explore ways to set them a task relating to their video that would change their mind in a positive way that changes their creative outlook!

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Next Generation

The Cannon Hill Collective offers young people aged 16-24 the chance to engage and connect with mac birmingham’s programme. From initiating, producing and delivering their own projects to advising on mac’s wider young people’s programme.